Walsall College has chosen Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and systems integrator Viglen to implement a converged infrastructure solution.
Following a review of its IT infrastructure, the college’s IT department found that its previous storage infrastructure was not delivering the acceptable performance, scalability and reliability needed for its staff and 7,500 students.
With courses running at weekends and during holiday time, the demand created a 24/7 working environment, which also became a burden for the college’s lean IT team to manage.
The chosen product, Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) Select, provides the college with a unified solution for storage, servers, networking and software management.
The single management platform will also reduce the burden on the IT team by consolidating the management of different systems, and ensure the college is able to quickly deploy and support a system that hosts mission-critical applications.
“As one of the UK’s leading further education establishments as recognised by Ofsted, we had to ensure that our students not only benefit from a good quality education, but are also supported by a reliable, high-performing IT service,” said Chris Evans, IT director at Walsall College.
“Hitachi UCP Select offers us a robust storage infrastructure, and the fact that it’s a converged solution allows us to manage the entire system easily and have it scale with us as we grow.”
Students and members of staff will benefit from a 24/7 remote monitoring service, which will identify problems before they escalate. The IT team will value a single support contract from HDS, which provides one source for technical assistance for all the systems within the converged solution.
